Microsoft's Movie Moments and Reading List apps for Windows Phone 8.1 now out

Microsoft has made two of its Windows 8.1 apps available for Windows Phone 8.1 devices, proving once (or twice) more that it wants to bridge the gap between desktop and phone apps. Starting today, you can download Movie Moments and Reading List from the Windows Phone Store.

Microsoft has previously described Movie Moments as a way for users to express themselves creatively. Think of it as a Fresh Paint for videos. Movie Moments has simple editing features for trimming video, adding short captions, inserting some music, and sharing short clips. And the new Windows Phone 8.1 version looks, at first blush, quite similar to the full Windows 8.1 app.

"With Windows 8.1, we introduced an app called Movie Moments that lets you take videos you’ve taken and edit them down into a shareable 60-second clip that captures a memorable moment with captions and music," explained Microsoft in a blog post. "With Movie Moments on Windows Phone 8.1, you can shoot a video and in 4 steps edit that video down to a clip that captures a specific moment that can easily be shared out to Facebook or to OneDrive."

As for Reading List, it's like Instapaper or Pocket. You can use it to store links, content, or articles for reading at a later time or while on the go. With today's release, you can now use the app between a Windows 8.1 PC and a Windows Phone 8.1 handset. It will sync between devices. Until today, Reading List syncing, as well as the ability to filter and sort articles into categories, was only supported on Windows 8.1. Now the Windows Phone 8.1 app does it too.

"Reading List on Windows Phone 8.1 shares many of the awesome features seen in the Windows 8.1 app like being able to organize and filter articles into categories," Microsoft explained. "Reading List on Windows Phone 8.1 has an improved Home screen that highlights an article from your list with a nice big version of the article’s image and under that, the Recently viewed section will show the five most recent things launched from Reading List."